Democratic Presidential Debate

Last night’s Democratic debate was not much of a game changer. It is fair to say that Vice President Joe Biden is still the front runner, despite attempts by Julian Castro to derail his lead by playing the ‘age and memory card’. Castro challenged Biden, by suggesting that he forgot what he said on his proposal to improve the Affordable Care Act. He asked the Vice President

“Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?”

It turns out that Castro was the one forgetting and it backfired on Castro because Biden was in fact correct.

One thing for sure the Vice President continued to attach himself the the legacy of Barack Obama. And we don’t blame him as he is polling 42% among blacks, among all the Democratic candidates. Last debate, most of the other leading candidates attacked Obama’s legacy, but not last night. Biden reiterated that he stood by Obamacare and not Medicare for all. He said he hoped to improve on it. He responded by saying,

“I know that the senator says that she’s for Bernie, well, I’m for Barack,”

At last night’s debate, Elizabeth Warren had no intention of alienating the Obama administration. She responded to Biden by saying,

“We all owe a huge debt to President Obama, who fundamentally transformed health care in America and committed this country to health care for every human being, and now the question is, how best can we improve on it?”

We had 10 candidates on the stage. The top 3 according to the recent polls, are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. We saw candidates who were deeply divided. Though the candidates all had different opinions on how they hope to handle, healthcare and guns, they were all clear that they need to remove President Trump from the White House. They all came to make that case. Was it enough?

Last night we heard a lot more from Andrew Yang, who in my opinion had an impressive night. His opinion statement had a different twist. He came for the digital viewers. His opening statement was,

“In America today, everything revolves around the almighty dollar. Our schools, our hospitals, our media, even our government. It’s why we don’t trust our institutions anymore. We have to get our country working for us again instead of the other way around. We have to see ourselves as the owners and shareholders of this democracy, rather than inputs into a giant machine.”

He went on to say,

“It’s time to trust ourselves more than our politicians. That’s why I’m going to do something unprecedented tonight. My campaign will now give a freedom dividend of $1,000 a month for an entire year to ten American families, someone watching this at home right now,”

After his announcement, the campaign tweeted this:

After last night’s debate, we are not sure if candidates like Harris, Yang, Bookor, O’Rourke and others can change the polls in their favor. Only time will tell. Despite all the noise on the debate stage, President Trump’s Twitter was unusually silent. Recent polls indicate that POTUS is polling at 38%. Something tells me that the race began last night.